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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

News Brief: More Black Men Now in Prison System than Were Enslaved

Damn yo...I swear sometimes seeing headlines like this just puts on soul on ice or least makes my psychology morbid... "Law Professor Michelle Alexander says the shocking incarceration rate is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color." To say the least, I don't really think that it's a complex math problem at all to make sense of all of the accumulation of crime but to be targeted somewhat biases the numbers. Nonetheless...even relative to class, social structure, or not, even within the people there still has to be an inherent consciousness of the people to &^%$$(%*&^)^....man, fuck it!

....I don't know, I guess the crazy thing about it all is I used to think when I was in the military and fighting overseas that i was actually fighting for my sanity, to preserve my heritage, and my personal legend fuck the country but then as I've grown and matured I've come to realize that in fact I wasn't actually fighting for the country, myself, or any of that at all, I was actually fighting to preserve the opportunity to make an impact on somebody else who may be able to pave a way that I was unable to, to reach the heart and soul of the people. Each one teach one is the method and the motive! Shout-out to all my n!ggas upstate. #RBG4life

“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation.

Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system

“Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” she said, even though studies have shown that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or above blacks. In some black inner-city communities, four of five black youth can expect to be caught up in the criminal justice system during their lifetimes.

As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities.

“What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.”

“If we were to return prison populations to 1970 levels, before the War on Drugs began,” she said. “More than a million people working in the system would see their jobs disappear.”

Words to Live by:

"Invictus" (Latin for "unconquered")
by William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.